﻿### What is Orchard?

#### Presentation
Orchard is a new Content Management System (CMS) from Microsoft. If you are not familiar with 
the idea of a CMS it's basically a web application specifically designed to allow end users to
create and manage the content without being required to know HTML, CSS, JavaScript, those sorts 
of things. The typical example would be a blog engine, but many websites are more complex than 
a blog that are being built today on CMS systems. 

There are large numbers of these CMS out there available. And they are available on all the 
platforms, a wide variety of capabilities. Many are built free and open source technologies. 
Some of them are large commercial projects targeted more to the bigger enterprise customers.
Here is a a few of the most popular CMS application applications of both PHP and the .NET 
platforms.

- PHP
  - WordPress
  - Joomla
  - Drupal
- .NET
  - Sharepoint
  - DotNetNuke
  - Umbraco

Of course there are many more including our topic here which is Orchard.

#### Why choose Orchard ?

The first most obvious factor may be the platform. Orchard have been built by a team of Microsoft 
naturally it's built on .NET, so if you are a .NET developer and that's what you are the most 
comfortable and you anticipate, you may want to get into the source code an extend it, Orchard would be a great choice on the Microsoft platform. However it's not the only choie on the microsofgt platform so are there some other reasons to choose Orchard. It's in the category of free open source software, the code is freely available under a new BSD licence on CodePlex, and the project is owned by the Outercurve foundation, not Microsoft itself. It's a true open source project where the contribution of community is accepted and encouraged. So that's a good reason to consider Orchard, but agina it's not the only free and open source CMS option even on .NET, so what about Orchard itself ?
Orchard is built is buit on what Scott Hanslemann likes to call "The Web Stack of Love". At it's core it's a frameowk built on 

- ASP.NET MVC 3
- Razor
- C# 4

You can also start quickly by using SQL Ce 4 as the database, and use WebMatrix. And everything makes developing Web more fun.


